Explaining Community's 'Gas Leak Year' Led To Some Wild Ideas In The Writers Room
I just finished another "Community" rewatch, making that number ... um ... maybe it's best if I don't say. Let's just say I'm a fan, even of the "gas leak" year. If you're unfamiliar with that term, it's season 4 of the show. Creator Dan Harmon was fired at the end of season 3, and new showrunners David Guarascio and Moses Port were hired to replace him. Season 4 went a little off the rails. It's still pretty fun (I genuinely do enjoy it, even after rewatches), but it's definitely missing that Harmon touch.
Harmon was rehired after season 4's ratings went down, and he stayed for seasons 5, which aired on NBC, and 6, which aired on Yahoo! Screen. When he came back, he had quite the job ahead of him: He and the writers' room had to find a way to bring the series back to the weird, quirky, and utterly hysterical comedy we all knew and loved.
Some of their ideas were pretty weird, but to be fair, this is a series in which there are several versions of reality and a "darkest timeline" (stop tossing dice when the pizza guy gets here!), a monkey named Annie's Boobs, a former teacher living in the air vents of a community college, regular paintball fights, and extensive pillow and blanket forts. How much weirder could it get?
In 2014, during the fifth season, Harmon spoke to Uproxx about returning to the show and the crazy ideas happening in the writers' room at the time.
'We talked about everything, no matter how absurd'
Harmon was asked about how it all went down, and said they spoke with new writers for two days, exploring all their options. "We talked about everything, no matter how absurd," he explained.
So what were some of these ideas? The first one Harmon mentioned had to do with Troy (Donald Glover) and Abed (Danny Pudi)'s Dreamatorium, the grid-like second bedroom that serves as a sort of "Star Trek" holodeck for their imaginary (or are they?) adventures in un-reality. He said:
"First of all, including Danny Pudi coming out of the cardboard Dreamatorium in his apartment at the beginning of season 5 and shaking it off and saying, 'That was weird.' I mean, insane things like just finding out that the Greendale that we had seen for that year was actually some strange underground test facility."
After the two days of writer discussions were up, he asked them a question: "Okay, so we know every single possibility. So what do we think we really need to do? What is really our job?" He said that there was complete agreement that they had to do sort of a new pilot "about the protagonist returning to his alma mater with whom he had a complex emotional relationship. We wanted to write a story that would hold up to the standard of a brand new television show being rolled out by NBC."
The Dean could have been the way back in
It makes total sense. We watched these characters grow and change, but season 4, fun as it was, did take things a little far with the whole "Changenesia" storyline, in which we're not sure if Ben Chang (Ken Jeong) has lost his memory or if he's messing with them all. It was definitely time for a refresher on who everyone was and getting them all back to Greendale Community College in the right way. Harmon wanted, he said, to reestablish everyone as broken people, with Jeff Winger (Joel McHale) back in a situation where he could convince the study group to do things for less-than-legit reasons.
If you recall the opener of season 5, entitled "Repilot," it begins with Jeff's superhero commercial for his failing law firm. He ends up back at the school as a law professor. But it could have gone a different way. Harmon mentioned another idea they had to bring everyone back to the same place. He said while they broke the story "pretty quickly," the outline changed a lot. He explained:
"There was at one point a fully broken story about how the Dean [Jim Rash] had summoned them all back because he had landed the school in financial jeopardy by taking grants from the federal government for a particle accelerator that he said Greendale had that didn't exist. And that the Greendale Seven – the Greendale Six – needed to spend the episode creating a cardboard particle accelerator that they had to convince this visiting politician was actually functioning."
To be fair, I would have 100 percent bought that storyline as organic to the series. It would have been un-DEAN-iably great. (Sorry. I had to get one "dean" joke in here.)
'We really needed to just have them sit around that table'
Harmon said they worked on that particular storyline for quite a while before ultimately abandoning it, and ultimately they came to the conclusion that they just needed to stick with a simpler approach. He said:
"We really needed to just have them sit around that table and reestablish themselves as broken people so that Jeff could actually give them permission to destroy Greendale, have them give him the power to do it on their behalf. Have him walk away and make his own decision that he would stop all this business about trying to be a lawyer forever and find a new home at Greendale as a permanent member of its halls."
Look, the drama behind the scenes might have been rough on the actors. It certainly was on the fans. However, the shake-up may have actually given the show more staying power than it might have had otherwise. This was an underdog show, and knowing about that side of it made many of us root for its success and love it all the more. That fan love has led us to the promised "Community" movie part of the hashtag #sixseasonsandamovie, and I'm grateful for it.
"Community" is currently streaming on both Netflix and Hulu.